It was jumbled up with the other letters and bills, but the moment I touched it my fingers tingled. The stamp was Australian but the envelope was so marked with fingerprints it looked as if it had passed through a hundred hands before reaching me. I sat down on the bench by the pool, surrounded by pots of gardenias, the only non-native plants in the garden, and opened it. The message struck me like a bolt of lightning.
If you are Anna Victorovna Kozlova, the daughter of Alina and Victor Kozlov from Harbin, please meet me on Monday at noon at the Hotel Belvedere dining room. I am able to arrange for you to see your mother.
The letter fell from my fingertips and fluttered in the breeze onto the grass. I watched it float for a moment like a paper boat. I tried to think who the letter’s author could be, who after all these years would contact me with news of my mother.
Ivan came home and I showed him the letter. He sat down on the couch and was quiet for a long time.
‘I don’t trust the author of this letter,’ he said. ‘Why doesn’t he give his name? Or ask you to telephone him first?’
‘Why would someone lie about my mother?’ I asked.
Ivan shrugged. ‘A Russian spy. Someone who wants to take you back to the Soviet Union. You may be an Australian citizen now, but who knows what they would do to you if you ended up there. Tang?’
It could have been Tang trying to trap me, but in my heart I didn’t believe that. Surely he would be dead by now or too old to pursue me. There was something else. I stared at the handwriting again, trying to unlock its secret.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ Ivan said, looking at me with tears in his eyes.
‘I have to,’ I said.
‘Do you believe your mother is alive?’
I thought about it but couldn’t separate what I longed to believe from what seemed most likely.
Ivan rubbed his face, covering his eyes with the heels of his palms. ‘I will go with you.’
Ivan and I hid our anxiety over the weekend by digging in the garden. We pulled out weeds, moved plants and built a rock garden along the driveway. Lily lay in her pram on the balcony, sleeping in the spring air. But despite our physical exertion, Ivan and I couldn’t sleep on Sunday night. We tossed and turned and mumbled together. Finally we had to sip a glass of hot milk each and resign ourselves to only a few hours’ rest. On Monday we drove to Irina and Vitaly’s house and left Lily with Irina. When we got back into our car, I turned around to take one last look at my daughter bundled up in Irina’s arms. I began to breathe sharply then, terrified that I may never see her again. I turned to Ivan and saw by the set of his jaw that he was thinking the same thing.
The Hotel Belvedere was long past its 1940s heyday. Ivan and I stepped out of the car and contemplated the neon sign over the doorway, the built-up grime on the walls, the scattered pot plants in the entrance. We looked in the dusty windows but could only see our own worried reflections staring back at us. Ivan clasped my hand and we stepped into the dark interior.
To our relief the hotel lobby was more welcoming than its exterior. The air was stuffy with mustiness and the lingering aroma of tobacco, but the worn chairs were clean, the tables polished and the tattered carpet vacuumed.
In the dining room a waitress stepped out from behind the counter and thrust a menu at us. I told her that we had come to meet someone. She shrugged as if meeting someone in a place like the Hotel Belvedere could only be a cover-up for something else, and her attitude made me agitated again. A young woman sitting by the window blinked at us then turned back to her book, more interested in the latest murder mystery than in a Russian couple clinging to each other in the middle of the room. Two tables from her an obese man was listening to a transistor radio, an earplug strung from his ear and a newspaper in his lap. His hair was shaved close to his skull so that his head looked small on his body. I turned to him but he stared back without recognition. The dining booths were down an aisle and out the back. I walked in front of Ivan, checking out the faded velour seats. I stopped as if I had struck an invisible wall. I felt him even before I saw him. I lifted my eyes to the last booth in the corner. He was aged, shrunken, staring back at me. I felt coldness on my cheek and remembered the first day he had come to our house and how I had hidden under a chair in the entranceway. The protruding, wide-spaced eyes, so unusual for a Japanese, were unmistakable.
The General stood up when he saw me, his lips trembling. He was shorter than me now, and no longer dressed in uniform but in a checked flannel shirt and a baseball jacket. However, he still stood erect and with dignity, his eyes flashing. ‘Come,’ he said, beckoning to me. ‘Come.’
Ivan slid into the seat next to me, silent and respectful, understanding that the man must be someone I knew. The General sat down too, his hands placed in front of him on the table. For a long while none of us could speak.
The General took a deep breath. ‘You are a grown woman,’ he said. ‘Beautiful but much changed. I can only tell it is you by your hair and your eyes.’
‘How did you find me?’ I asked, my voice barely audible.
‘Your mother and I have been searching for you for a long time. But war and the Communists have prevented us from reaching you until now.’
‘My mother?’
Ivan put his arm around me, protectively. The General glanced at him, as if seeing him for the first time.
‘Your mother could not leave Russia to come here as easily as I. So I came to see you.’
My whole body began to shake. I couldn’t feel my toes or my fingers. ‘My mother is dead,’ I cried, half standing. ‘Tang took her from the train and shot her. She has been dead for years.’
‘You must tell us this story clearly,’ Ivan said. ‘My wife has endured so much. We were told that her mother was dead. That she was taken from the transportation train from Harbin and executed.’
The General’s eyes widened at Ivan’s speech and, just as it had on that first day in Harbin, his face reminded me of a toad.
‘Anya, your mother was indeed taken from the train before she reached the Soviet Union. But not by Tang. By me.’
I sat down again and began to cry.
The General took my hands in his, a gesture more Russian than Japanese. ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘I was an actor. I pretended to be Tang. I took your mother from the train and faked the execution.’
I looked at him through blurry eyes, this man of my childhood who was speaking to me. I listened in a daze when he told me that his name was Seiichi Mizutani and that he had been born in Nagasaki. His father had owned a theatre and when he was ten the family moved to Shanghai where he learned to speak fluent Mandarin. The General’s family moved between cities frequently, entertaining the Japanese who were migrating to China in ever increasing numbers, and had even made a trip to Mongolia and Russia. But when the Japanese officially invaded China in 1937 the General’s wife and daughter were sent back to Nagasaki and the General was forced to become a spy. The year before my mother was taken away he brought in his biggest catch, the most notorious leader of the Chinese resistance. Tang.
‘I befriended him,’ the General said, his eyes fixed on our clasped hands. ‘He trusted me. He told me his dreams for China. He was passionate, he was bright, he was selfless. He used to always come to see me with whatever food he could find. “For you, my friend,” he would say. “I stole this from the Japanese for you.” Or when he couldn’t bring food, he would bring a fan or a piece of poetry or a book. It was two years before I turned him in. Until then I used him to root out others.’
The General took a sip of water. His eyes were heavy and I saw the pain in them. ‘I am responsible for turning him into the monster he became,’ he said. ‘My betrayal deformed him.’
I closed my eyes. I could never forgive Tang for what he had done, but at least I could finally understand why his hate had been so relentless.
After a while the General continued his story. ‘The day I left your home we had been told nothing except that Japan
had surrendered and that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been destroyed. It was years before I had any idea of the extent of what had been done to my city: a third of it destroyed; hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured, and thousands who became sick later and died slow painful deaths. As I was departing from Harbin I met my aide. He told me that your mother had been questioned and that she was being transported back to the Soviet Union. I was sorry but decided that I could only save myself and that I must get back to Japan to discover the fate of my wife and daughter. However, on the road I had a terrible vision. I saw my wife, Yasuko, standing on a hill on the horizon, waiting for me. I moved closer to her and realised that she was cracked and dry like a broken clay pot. There was a little shadow standing in the crook of her arm, and the shadow was crying. It was Hanako, my daughter. The shadow came running to me but disappeared as soon as she touched me, burning into my side. I lifted my shirt and saw the flesh was peeling like a banana skin from my ribs. It was then that I understood they were dead and it was because I had been negligent with you and your mother that they had been killed. Perhaps the spirit of your father had taken revenge on me.
‘I had to move quickly then. I knew the train would approach the border by evening. I was afraid and unsure of what to do. Each idea that came to me seemed doomed for failure. Then I remembered that Tang had worked with the Soviets. I stole some rags from a farmhouse and used them to bind my hands. I stuffed them with dead mice to imitate the smell of decaying flesh that had hung around Tang ever since he had escaped from the camp. By impersonating him I was able to secure a plane to the border, where I convinced three of the Communist guards to come with me to intercept the train and execute your mother.’
The General stopped for a moment, pursing his lips. He was no longer the awesome figure of my childhood. He was a frail, trembling old man, weighed down by the heaviness of his memories. He glanced up at me as if he had heard my thoughts. ‘It was probably the most outrageous plan I had ever made,’ he said. ‘And I was not sure if it would work or if it would only get your mother and myself killed. When I stormed into the prison carriage your mother’s eyes opened wide and I knew that she recognised me. I had one of the guards drag her by the hair to the door, and she struggled and screamed like an actress. Up until the last moment, the guards thought we were going to shoot your mother. Instead I pushed her to the ground, wrestled the gun off the guards, shot out the lights of the car and then shot them.’
‘Where did you go afterwards?’ Ivan asked. I dug my fingers into his arm, grounding myself. He was the only thing that was solid. The walls of the dining room seemed to be shifting, closing in on me. My head was light. Everything was unreal. My mother. My mother. My mother. She was coming back to life before my eyes so many years after I had accepted her death.
‘Your mother and I hurried back to Harbin as best we could,’ the General said. ‘The journey was treacherous and took us three days. Your mother’s appearance was more conspicuous than mine and that put us in danger. By the time we reached the city the Pomerantsevs were gone and so were you. Your mother collapsed when we found the burned-out shell of your home. But a neighbour told us that you had been rescued by the Pomerantsevs and sent to Shanghai.
‘Your mother and I decided that we would go to Shanghai to find you. We couldn’t go through Dairen because the Soviets were stopping the Russians who were trying to escape by sea. Instead we travelled south by rivers and canals or by land. At Peking we stopped in a house not far from the railway station, intending to travel to Shanghai by train the following morning. But it was there that I realised we were being followed. At first I thought I was imagining things, until I saw the shadow lingering behind your mother when she went to buy the tickets. The shadow of a man without hands. “If we go to Shanghai, we will lead him straight to her,” I told your mother, for I knew Tang was no longer interested in only me.’
I squeezed Ivan’s arm tighter when I realised how close my mother had come to reaching me. Peking was only a day away from Shanghai by train.
‘The Japanese had always been interested in Mongolia,’ the General said, his voice sounding more urgent, as if he were remembering the terror he had lived through. ‘Part of my spy training had been to memorise the routes the European archaeologists had used to make their way through the Gobi Desert. And of course I knew about the Silk Road.
‘I told your mother that we must head north to the border where we would lose Tang in the rugged terrain. For where we were going, a man without hands would perish, even a man as determined as him. My goal was to get your mother to Kazakhstan and then make the journey to Shanghai myself. At first your mother resisted but I told her: “Your daughter is safe in Shanghai. What use will you be to her dead?”
‘It may seem that taking your mother to Kazakhstan was putting her into the hands of the Soviets. But the art of the spy is to blend in, and Kazakhstan was in chaos after the war. Thousands of Russians had fled there to escape the Germans, and there were many people without identification papers.
‘Experienced riders could have made the trip in three months, but the journey to Kazakhstan took us almost two years. We bought horses from a tribe of herders but we had to be careful not to push them beyond their endurance and we could only travel over the seven-month summers. As well as the Soviet presence on the border and Communist guerillas, we faced dust storms and miles of stony desert, and one of our guides died from a viper bite. If not for the few words of Mongolian I knew, and the hospitality of local tribes, your mother and I would have perished. I don’t know what happened to Tang. I have never seen him since and he obviously never found you. I like to think that he died pursuing us in the mountains. It would have been the only fitting release for his tortured soul. Killing us would not have given him that.
‘Your mother and I reached Kazakhstan wasted by the journey. We found rooms in the home of an old Kazak woman. When my strength returned, I told your mother that I would go back to China and search for you. “You were separated from your daughter because of me,” I told her. “I did things during the war in order to protect my family, but in the end I could do nothing to save them. I must make amends or they will not rest in peace.”
‘“It’s not because of you that I lost my daughter,” your mother answered. “The Soviets would have transported us both to a camp after the war. At least I know that she is safe. Perhaps I too have a chance because of you.”
‘Your mother’s words touched me deeply and I dropped to my knees and bowed to her. I realised then that there was a bond between us. Perhaps we had formed it during our journey when we depended on each other for survival. Perhaps it is something from a former life. I had such a bond with my wife, that is how I knew that she had died in Nagasaki.
‘Although I could move more easily through China alone, I was delayed by the battles waged by Communist and Nationalist armies. There were bands still loyal to the warlords wandering the country, and every step was a dangerous one. Trains were easy targets, so I travelled by water or foot. All the time I pondered the question of how I would return that distance with a White Russian girl. But as it turned out I could not find you in that monster of a city known as Shanghai. I searched for Anya Kozlova in the Russian cabarets, the stores and restaurants. I had no picture of you. Only a description of a girl with ginger hair. It was as if you had vanished. Or perhaps your people were suspicious of me and wanted to protect one of their own. Finally, someone told me that he believed there was a Russian girl with red hair at a nightclub called the Moscow-Shanghai. I sped there, full of expectation. But the owner, an American woman, told me that I was mistaken. The redheaded girl was a cousin who had long since returned to the United States.’
Nausea rose up in my belly. My mind turned over the dates. The General must have reached Shanghai late in 1948, when I was sick with influenza and Dmitri was betraying me with Amelia. The General’s story had made Tang seem more human; he was a man distorted by the cruelty that had been done to him. But
Amelia was an abomination. If the General had found me in the days when Sergei was alive, she would have been glad to have seen the back of me. But her only motive for her actions after his death was her spite.
‘The Communists were closing in on the city,’ the General said. ‘If I didn’t leave soon I would be trapped there. I was torn between looking for you and getting back to your mother. For I had experienced another vision: your mother stretched out on a burning bed. She was in danger.
‘Indeed, when I did make it back to Kazakhstan the old woman told me that your mother had become seriously ill with diphtheria, but she had improved with the boiled horse meat and milk tonics the woman had been administering. I dared not show my face to your mother until she had recovered. When I did finally go into the room where your mother was resting, she sat up and looked beyond me. When she saw that I had failed her, that I had not brought you back, she fell into a depression so deep I thought she might try to kill herself.
‘“Don’t despair,” I told her. “I believe that Anya is alive and safe. When you are better we will head west to the Caspian Sea.” The Soviet presence in Kazakhstan had increased and the border with China was more closely guarded. I thought that if your mother and I could escape to the West, we might be able to get out of Kazakhstan by boat. Your mother closed her eyes and said, “I don’t know why, but I trust you. I believe you will help me find my daughter.”’
The General stared into my eyes and said, ‘I realised then that I loved her, and that I couldn’t expect or deserve her love until I found you.’
I was momentarily struck dumb by this revelation. And yet there was another feeling tingling under my skin. Twice after my father’s death I had heard his voice promise me that he would send someone. I had been blessed with many people who had helped me in my life, but I suddenly understood who my father had meant.
White Gardenia Page 44